'Desires thwarted by fate', 21 December 2008, The Sun-Herald |
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| THE initial germination of Flanagan's new novel was the author being shown a 19th-century portrait of an Aboriginal girl in a red dress, the picture cropped to censor her naked feet. He saw the picture a quarter of a century ago but apparently it has haunted him since, a fitting prelude to a work that captures inexplicable, lingering desire perfectly. Moving seamlessly through time, across two continents and between three storylines, Wanting is a marvel of precision and cohesion. In prose that is lean and elegant, pretty without being prissy, Flanagan circles his subject with a tight focus, never losing track of the book's theme nor allowing its concentration on the terrible power of desire to seem limiting or forced. The characters are based on real historical figures and fit into the broad outlines of what is known of them but Flanagan makes no claims to authenticity and the story is better for this approach. It is a universal tale, not tailored to the specificity of biography. The girl from the photo, Mathinna, is one of the Aborigines whom Robinson, more often referred to as the Protector, is charged with looking after. He does this by providing European homes and discipline, believing the indigenous people must be introduced to the restraint and reason that separates civilised people from savages. He also offers medical services, including bloodletting, a task he performs with complete passivity. Meanwhile, Charles Dickens struggles to recreate the warmth of home and hearth his novels celebrate. He finds himself at a low ebb, struggling with the death of his child and his strength sapped by the toil of his latest work, Little Dorrit. He is unhappy in his marriage and haunted by his rejection at the hands of Maria Beadnell, a slight he avenged in his fiction. The story's other central character is Lady Jane Franklin, whose husband, Sir John Franklin, famously disappeared on an Arctic voyage to find the North-West Passage. She does not so much pine for his improbable return but believes she can bring him back through sheer force of will. Maintaining a stiff upper lip and a repressed brand of upper-class jollity, she finds temporary respite when her friend Dickens publishes a stinging riposte to claims that when her husband's mission ended in failure the party resorted to cannibalism. Neither Dickens's work or Lady Jane's stoicism is enough for either of them, however, and the writer seeks to escape himself by appearing as a villain in a stage play, while Lady Jane decamps to the colony in Tasmania, where she is struck by a vision of Mathinna dancing. She is charismatic and beautiful, possessing a freedom of movement utterly alien to refined British sensibilities. The Englishwoman adopts her, thus beginning the "experiment" of educating her in the English style. Everyone is captive to history, with flawed ideas about destiny; the Protector and Lady Jane believe the Aborigines to be a dying race, while the latter's disbelief at Sir John's failure is grounded in notions of the English invincibility and righteousness. Dickens, meanwhile, already the most feted writer of his age, found even his mighty powers of imagination could not get him what he wanted and his powers as a puppeteer of fictional characters proved useless in real life. This is the realisation he makes when he is gripped with tormented desire for the young actress Ellen Ternan. Their final on-stage, off-script confrontation is the book's most deeply moving scene. Out of longing, Nick Cave once sung, great wonders have been willed. But Flanagan knows even the strongest yearning can mean nothing against the tides of fate. His beautifully bleak riffs on this universal theme make Wanting one of the finest novels of the year. |